The Informed Design Cycle

2. Research and investigate the problem

In order to search for desirable solutions to a given design challenge, it is important to keep the following questions in mind:

What is the correct state-of-the-art status for any given idea? Are there similar products on the market? For a solution to be innovative, you should find out existing solutions and analyze how they solved the defined problems.
What is the target user of the product? How much do you think the user is willing to pay for the product? If you want your solution to be proficient, the design can't be ranked until the user and the market are identified.
How would this product be used?

Whatever the design challenge, it is important to make sure that your design is feasible and can be tested in the laboratory.Before any idea can be effectively ranked using a problem-solving matrix, you must get sufficient data to identify :

the correct state of the art
the market potential
the procedure for testing

Procedure for research and investigation

The World Wide Web is a powerful information resource that can be an effective tool to find answers to the above questions. If you are not familiar with the procedure to find the information using the search engine, you may want to consult web Search strategies or you can go directly to Google and search the web by typing in "safety light joggers" to find information about state-of-the-art commercially available products. Using these web-search results, you can find other information related to users and markets. The testing procedures will be discussed in KSB #3.